5 Things You Need To Overreact After Week 1

Shawn Siegele (0:03)

It's McBride! Oh, one-hander, CD Lamb!

Colm Kelly (0:13)

What should you overreact to in NFL Week 1? That's what we're talking about today on RotoViz Overtime. My name is Colm Kelly. I'm joined, as always, by Shawn Siegele.

This, Shawn, was a really, really fun Week 1 We talked last week, and we made some bold predictions. And at the end of it, we said, this is going to be a high-scoring season. And then we had the early games, the Wednesday night game, the Thursday night game. I'm like, whew.

Shawn Siegele (0:40)

Colm, we've been pretty good with some aggressive predictions. I didn't love at least half, if not my whole prediction after Week 1

Colm Kelly (0:49)

I was a little bit concerned after those couple of games. But to go on further on that, we have had a lot of points in NFL Week 1 We almost had a league record. Kevin had a fun article up on Monday on rotoviz.com, talking about the possibility for it being the highest Week 1 in league history, if the Monday Night Football game finished with 42 or more points. It finished with 41, so one point short of the 2020-12 Week 1 total scoring. But my question, Shawn, for you is, is it a case of, is this a once-off, or is this the hot start that we wanted? Because there's been a number of Week 1s, Week 2s, Week 3s over the last maybe four years where we're like, yeah, hopefully it all starts to come together, you know, there'll be more scoring. But this was pretty offensive driven right off the bat in Week 1, and it was quite enjoyable for that.

Shawn Siegele (1:46)

It was very fun. I think it was going to be scoring, right? The kickoff rules are favorable for it. I saw a lot of big kickoffs in Week 1

The note that I had on Stealing Bananas was that it was an extremely heavy fumble week, which will often give you a good field position. The field position matters because the teams are still not passing successfully. One of the things that is good or bad, depending on the way that you drafted, the pro robust running back thesis looks very good after one week. Although, if you didn't have Jalen Coker and you didn't have somebody way down in the undrafted, so it was going to be hard to find wide receiver points late as well. I do think that those things will get going a bit as we go through. There were some teams, I mean, one of the things, and I'm sort of predisposed to be optimistic, and then predisposed to believe in the preseason thesis on the guys that we thought probably could be undervalued. And it will be hard to have a more encouraging usage start in terms of what the game plan was for you, and simultaneously discouraging scoring start than Xavier Worthy, for example. But, I mean, Travis Kelsey completely watched, has a big play where there's no one around him. Rishi Rice does not look like the Rishi Rice of old. There was manufacturer stuff for Worthy all the time. Didn't fully take advantage, but they basically didn't have to pass at all on that game. There are gonna be some situations, and I think the flip side of that would be Jordan Addison, where you're like, nope, everything about the Vikings is gonna be bad, bad. But they're gonna be passing games that get going. We're gonna see scoring from the receivers.

And for many of the running backs, including the big names, right? They've already hit basically their biggest game of the season in week one. But yeah, I think teams are gonna score. I think they've figured out how to attack these defenses where, you know, if you're the Buffalo Bills and you're not even making a token attempt to stop the run, I mean, a David Montgomery is going to cut through you like you're not there. There are gonna be big scores against defenses who have taken the philosophy of the last couple of years and exaggerated it to the point where old school coaches wouldn't even recognize it as football in terms of what they're trying to do to stop the run.

I mean, for me, the biggest question is, can passing games take advantage of this a bit too? Outside of second half, Tyler Shook. I mean, Colin, we didn't even get fourth quarter bonics in this one.

Colm Kelly (4:46)

We got fourth quarter Tyler Shook, though, and we will talk about that a little bit as we go through. Shawn, this show is going to be the positives. Are they so positive that you need to under overreact? Show that comes out on Thursday is going to be some of those names that Shawn has already touched on that maybe didn't have the weak one that people would have hoped for. But even on that, Shawn, you're mentioning the running backs and how teams like maybe the Bills in that situation with Houston allowed some running back big plays to happen. Thought David Montgomery had a really strong game. We have to obviously say that, but it'll be interesting to see then if we see defenses have to go back a little bit in the opposite direction to open it up for passing games as we move forward. The one thing I really liked was I thought teams, particularly early in games, sometimes we see in these games where teams will take a safe option early in the first quarter and into the second quarter, maybe they'll punt in those situations. I thought we've seen a lot more aggressive play calling across the league in general in those early quarters, which made me feel quite positive. And it's probably just a coincidence, but then it led to a very high score in the week, which obviously is kind of me just adding what I thought and it working out. But the other thing, Shawn, I want to mention as we start, I was actually astonished by this today when it popped up. I had like a, sometimes a reminder of a memory or that pops up. And I kind of was like, I started this podcast close to the time my daughter was born, which was 2018 And I was thinking, when did we start it? So Shawn, I went back and looked. September 2017 brings us to the ninth year of RotoViz OT here, which if we add up the seasons, I believe it means this is the 10th season. It's over a thousand episodes.